Everything You Think You Know About Adoption is a Lie The Empress Han

Adoption is not about love. Adoption is about power.

Particularly, in the midst of the holiday season, there is a heavy focus on love and gratitude, which can be loaded concepts for Adoption Survivors. In this fifth episode of Everything You Think You Know About Adoption is a lie, we confront the lie that "love is enough."

If Adoption was truly about Love, then it would use Power to strengthen and empower families to stay together. Instead, Adoption leverages Power and weaponizes Love to surveil, destabilize, coerce, and exploit families for the commodification and procurement of children to benefit and profit the privileged.

The dominant adoption narrative purports that adoption provides children with "better lives." In this third episode, I present a counter narrative that questions the idea of adoption as a "better life."

In this fourth episode, we confront the myth that adoption is "God's plan." This episode includes personal anecdotes from my experiences of growing up and working as a staff member in the Church. I also challenge common narratives that position adoption survivors as a "gift from God" or an "answer to prayer."

The first episode provided an introduction to Everything You Think You Know About Adoption is a Lie. In this second episode, we begin to deconstruct the Orphan Myth. I start with a decolonial definition of Transracial Adoption followed by truths, facts, and personal anecdotes that deconstruct the Orphan Myth. The episode concludes with a poem titled, Side by Side. (Content Warning: mention of genocide)

Welcome to Everything You Think You Know About Adoption is a Lie: Affirming and Centering Lived Experiences in the Deconstruction of the Adoption Myth.


In this introduction episode titled "The Call," I share about the the moment I received a phone call that my Korean parents had been located, and what unfolded in the aftermath. I also explore the reasons and purpose for creating this space.

Every You Think You Know About Adoption is a Lie is a collection of insights, truths, personal anecdotes, poetry, reflections, and thoughts intended to provide a more complex counter narrative to the dominant and overly sanitized and romanticized adoption narrative.


The content is a step toward deconstructing common myths used in popular society to uphold and perpetuate the larger Adoption Myth. It is also a call to know the truth about the systems underlying not only the circumstances of my adoption but the historical and geopolitical circumstances of oppression of which adoption is an extension.


I hope by sharing what I have learned that together we can continue to tear down the curtain of lies, so that the truth may thrive and grow within our hearts and our communities as we envision and create a future that allows us all to know love, safety, and liberation.